Did RHOD's LeeAnne Locken really say her violent threats are just 'slang'?

Leah Prinzivalli writes about pop culture, beauty and health and has interviewed some of your favorite reality stars. She has been published in VICE, Reductress, The Toast, The Frisky, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, l...

No one is denying the fact that The Real Housewives of Dallas' LeeAnne Locken has had a hard life. But does that mean she can treat her RHOD coworkers however she wants? On last week's episode, she grew increasingly angry after what started out as joke — a story about her pooping in a car. (Yes, it was that silly. Or, at least, it should have been.) It escalated into the fellow Housewives saying that they were in true fear of Locken as she grew angrier and finally threatened Marie Reyes, "I'm going to kill you."

Now that the episode has aired, Locken turned to People to share her side of the story. "People for over a year up to that point had been coming to me and telling me things that Marie was saying about me, and these were all negative things that were lies about me," she said. "And I kept defending her for a year. But once you realize, you're like, 'Damn this hurts.' It hurt to a level of bringing up all of that other hurt — and to hurt me that deeply is how deeply I was hurt as a child."

Locken is a survivor of abuse and she says that the insults from Reyes bring back that time in her life. "It brought it all back up and what happens is I become so angry — because that's how I express hurt — that basically my mouth takes over, my brain shuts down," she continued. "There's no other way to describe it.

"When I say things like, 'I'm going to kill you' — how many times have you heard a parent, even characters on sitcoms say that? It's slang to me," she says. There's no excuse for what Locken has been through — but we also don't love seeing her threaten her friends with murder. Is RHOD the best place for her to work out her unresolved issues?